for the story goes : After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

After reviewing the various possible legal solutions to this problem, Mayer-Schönberger says he is more convinced by a technological fix: namely, mimicking human forgetting with built-in expiration dates for data. He imagines a world in which digital-storage devices could be programmed to delete photos or blog posts or other data that have reached their expiration dates, and he suggests that users could be prompted to select an expiration date before saving any data.

I can’t read these fear mongering “bewaaaare what you have revealed of yourself on the Internet will soon destroy you” articles without getting pretty annoyed (okay, and alternately terrified, because, well, obviously) but I kind of like this idea!

By and large I treat my blog, its content and my resulting online personae with the casual disregard it deserves. Ha! No really, though, I take a “the times they are a changin’” approach, which is to say I don’t allow myself to worry about it because virtually everybody is in the same boat, or, will be soon enough. (Thanks Facebook!) Honestly, I kind of like the idea that at some point we’ll be living in a world where all our shit is collectively out on the table, accessible to all. I think we could benefit as a people from being less swathed in lies and illusions.

That said, an expiry date on pictures and information posted (by us and especially others) seems, at the very least, interesting. Certainly, I’m grateful that there’s little to no trace of my Internet presence from, say, age 14 to 21. (And that one thing that is out there? Oh man. Oh man, oh man, oh man. I’d advise teenagers against posting poetry far more than I’d advise them against posting nudies or the like.) And perhaps in five or ten years I’ll feel differently about what’s out there of me currently.

But this idea that we have to preserve the artifice of reputation just seems so archaic. I mean, we’re all bad and dirty and pathetic and failed—but we still need jobs, and the jobs still need us. The sooner we can get to a place where we’re allowed to have multiple identities—and they’re allowed to coexist, out in the open—the better. And we get there the same way we got to a place where people with visible tattoos became just as hire-able as anybody else—by saying screw it, I’m getting this sleeve tattoo.

for the story goes

This is your brain on shrugs.